Comment by pona-a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pona-a | Hacker News Reader

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Did we survive these entities? By current projections, between 13.9% and 27.6% of all species would be likely to be extinct by 2070 [0]. The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths associated with lacking health insurance [1]. Thanks to intense lobbying by private prisons, the US incarceration rate is 6 times that of Canada, despite similar economic development [2].

Sure, the human species is not yet on the brink of extinction, but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in worldwide birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself is being pulled apart for paperclips. Changing the scale and magnitude to a hypothetical entity equivalent to a hundred copies of the generation's brightest minds with a pathological drive to maximize an arbitrary metric might only mean one of two things: either its fixation leads it to hacking its own reward mechanism, putting it in a perpetual comma while resisting termination, or it succeeds at doing the same on a planetary scale.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.17125

[1] https://healthjusticemonitor.org/2024/12/28/estimated-us-dea...

[2] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...

> but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in worldwide birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself is being pulled apart for paperclips

People choose to have fewer kids as they get richer, it's not about living conditions like so many people like to claim, otherwise poor people wouldn't be having so many children. Even controlling for high living conditions, like in Scandinavia, people still choose to have fewer kids.

I would worry about the correlation isn't causation in the above statement. Having less kids making you richer seems just as, if not more, plausible of an explanation (among other possibilities).

The upper class people in scandinavia are having more kids than the middle class.

Housing seems to be a pretty common issue that doesn't prevent people from having kids but if it delays (which it often does) it does the same job of dropping birthrates. I wish people would stop acting like it's only a wealth issue. Like oh if people get more money they no longer want kids....no

You don't need a house to have kids. Poor people manage to have kids with no assets whatsoever and many animals manage to have kids without anything even resembling a house.

It seems much more likely that humans don't have a particular impulse to have children because their instincts were designed for a world without birth control. Having children has become uneconomic, so people stopped. There isn't a natural instinct to raise alarms about that (which is what evolution would tend to do) because historically that just wouldn't have mattered. Both because people were poor and because sex used to imply children in a way it doesn't now.

The house thing is really a red herring. Sure we'd all like to own a house and being wealthy is better than being poor. But in a literal sense - not necessary and for almost all of our evolutionary history people have been reproducing without any wealth at all. The stats actually seem reasonably clear that it is exactly wealth that is blocking the children, despite the excuses that people come up with.

A real boon from chance that is unlikely to last, we're probably lucky to be living in this era before evolution starts kicking in and pushing us back towards overpopulation. Which will happen in a few generations.

>You don't need a house to have kids.

Tell that to a good bunch of people I know who feel secure about their living situation well into their thirties and then of course that 3rd or 4th kid or even 2nd kid they might have felt comfortable having never happens.

What was the historical standard does not matter today in this context. One set of my great grandparents had 8 kids in an abode smaller than mine today. Yet I do not have a single one because where would I put it. A room where i have to strip the walls?

>before evolution starts kicking in and pushing us back towards overpopulation

societal evolution will work quicker than biological evolution ever will. Most of the families with lots of kids here in western europe are conservative muslims.

The conversation started with Low birth rates in advanced economies - and you talk about how poverty is correlated with having kids.

It's not about being rich or not, it's about working hard to have a simple life. If you take a look into all those people who are not having kids, usually is because their work and balance in life needs to be like that. If you have a kid, it will lag your career and probably will stop the way you make more money each year, by growing up or scaling up in your company.

> otherwise poor people wouldn't be having so many children

Chalking it up to choice seems a bit unfair. I suspect lack of access to birth control probably plays a part.

We (humans) have not only survived but thrived. 200,000 annual deaths is just 7% of the 3mil that die each year. More (as a percentage) probably died from access to the best health care 100 or 200 years ago. The fall in birth rates is, IMO, a good thing as the alternative, overpopulation seems like a far scarier specter to me. And to bring it back to AI's, an AI "with a pathological drive to maximize an arbitrary metric" is a hypothetical without any basis in reality. While fictional literature -- where I assume you got that concept -- is great for inspiration, it rarely has any predictive power. One probably shouldn't look to it as a guideline.

And 'associated with' is pretty weak as far as causality goes. I bet they all also drank water.

> The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths associated with lacking health insurance

Isn't this just about the advancement of medical science? I.e. Wouldn't they have died from the same causes regardless of medical insurance a few decades ago?

To take it to the extreme, let's say that I invent a new treatment that can extend any dying person's life by a year for the cost of $10M, and let's say that there is a provider that is willing to insure for that for an exorbitant cost. Then wouldn't almost every single person still dying be dying from lack of insurance?

You have to be careful with species. It could be dominated by obscure minor local variations in insects and fungi that nobody would even notice went missing and which might not actually matter.

Apparently almost all animal species are insects:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-described-speci...

> The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths associated with lacking health insurance [1].

'Associated with' is a pretty lose term.

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